Before Picard, Patrick Stewart played a firefighter on Coronation Street — in his own Yorkshire accent

Of all the Patrick Stewart footage people have pulled up since his death on October 28, at 86, the one getting the most "wait, what?" reactions is about 60 years old and in black and white. In episode 638 of Coronation Street, broadcast on January 25, 1967, Stewart plays an unnamed fire officer called to 15 Mawdsley Street. The fire was started by the street's resident hapless young man, Dennis Tanner, who'd been decorating the house for Len Fairclough.

The clip isn't new. It first surfaced online in 2018 and had a second moment in 2020, when Den of Geek noted that most people had no idea Stewart had ever been in Corrie. What's new is how people are listening to it. The voice isn't the one that gave orders on the Enterprise bridge for seven seasons, it's the Yorkshire he grew up with, and for a lot of people saying goodbye to him this week, it's the first time they've heard it.

The voice he was told to lose

Stewart was born in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, in 1940, left school at 15, and grew up speaking what he called "a very, very broad accent." Asking a friend to come out to play, he told NPR's Fresh Air in 2020, came out as "At a laikin' aht."

His acting teacher, Ruth Wynn Owen, told him he would have to "lose that accent" if he wanted to play everything on stage. So for a while, Stewart ran two voices: Received Pronunciation at his weekend lessons, Yorkshire at school during the week. Sometimes he mixed them up.

"Did that get me in trouble with my friends."

— Patrick Stewart, on Fresh Air, 2020

By 1966 he was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the RP stuck. That voice carried him through Picard, Professor X, and decades of Shakespeare. The Corrie clip catches him a year into the RSC, on a Manchester-made soap, before the training had fully won.

Picard, a Frenchman, spoke in the stage English of a Yorkshireman from Mirfield.

Every accent people heard in him

The accent he trained into himself was so thorough that audiences spent his whole career guessing where he was from:

• Yorkshire: the real one, and the one he almost never used on screen.
• Received Pronunciation: the stage voice built with Wynn Owen, and the one most of the world knows.
• French: technically Captain Jean-Luc Picard's nationality. The Next Generation never gave Picard a French accent, and nobody seemed to mind.
• Scottish: a long-running mistake, helped along by his surname and by his Saturday Night Live turn as Phil McCracken, in a sketch with Mike Myers built on the catchphrase "If it's not Scottish, it's craaap!" Stewart wrote in his memoir that he and his wife Sunny still liked to say it around the house.

There's one more joke in the Corrie footage for anyone from the north of England. Coronation Street is set in fictional Weatherfield, on the Lancashire side of the Pennines, so one of Stewart's earliest television roles had a Yorkshireman putting out a fire in Lancashire.

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He never stopped claiming the other side, either. Stewart served as chancellor of the University of Huddersfield from 2004 to 2015 and supported Huddersfield Town all his life.

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